John Brockman, SantaFe (Katinka Matson,1997)
John Brockman is the literary agent, writer, impresario and producer whose engagement in the arts and sciences forms the very foundation of his remarkable business. Based in N.Y.C he holds a position as one of the true networkers on the American and international scene of art, science, media and culture. As a devoted dinner host he brings the most sharp minds together and on his website Edge he provides for daily intellectual jam sessions. Here he talks to curator Hans Ulrich Obrist.

Hans Ulrich Obrist (HUO:) You were talking about differences between Europe and America?

"There is a very different situation in America where the
artists basically get no respect, and neither do the scientists. There is
no premium placed in this society, in this culture, on erudition and
knowledge."

John Brockman (JB): "Nobody knows, and you can't find out" is one of the ideas that I live
by. When I think about Europe, I add another phrase: "Nobody knows, you
can't find out, and you have to ask permission". Europe is all about
asking permission, whether it's in Science, where you are not allowed to
ask a question until you are forty years old and a professor, or art where
you're surrounded by statues commissioned by the rulers celebrating death
for centuries. There is a very different situation in America where the
artists basically get no respect, and neither do the scientists. There is
no premium placed in this society, in this culture, on erudition and
knowledge. You are judged in your neighborhood on whether or not your
house is painted, you keep your lawn mowed and you treat your children
well. If you get along at that level, people accept you on that basis.
Whether you are a nuclear physicist or a Noble laureate in Biology is
beside the point; people just don't seem to care that much. In Europe on
the other hand, a major scientist is "Herr Professor" and lives an exalted
existence in a very hierarchical mode, whereas the younger people are not
allowed to open their mouths until they reach a certain level and a certain
age, and that age can be when in their forties. In America you go to any
University and everybody is on a first name basis and the doors are open.
People don't get the same kind of respect, but in a way it's a deeper
respect, because it's about ideas, it's not about institutions. Years ago,
I had written "By the Late John Brockman", was invited by Alan Watts John
Lilly to a conference which they called the American University of Masters,
which was a joke because if you spell out the initials it's "AUM". The
idea was that these masters were people whose authority was derived from
their persona and their ideas, not from their institutions. It included
Heinz von Foerster, Gregory Bateson, Stewart Brand among others.

HUO: When did this conference take place?

JB: 1973. We were all brought together to spend a week studying laws of
form ... Spencer Brown's mathematical formulations. I was a late invitee. I
went because I wanted to hear Richard Feynman, the keynote speaker. When I
arrived and asked when he was scheduled to speak, the person at the desk
showed me the schedule: his name was crossed out and mine written in pencil
next to it. He had become ill and was unable to attend. I never did get to
meet him. The point is you don't have to ask permission in America, and
that allows people to be wild, at least in their heads, and that's where
you get your breakthroughs.

HUO: You mentioned in your book Digerati the importance of the
salon-like evenings which were organized by John Cage. Can you tell me a
little more about this and how it influenced you to do your own salon, and
maybe the differences because your own salon changed considerably over time.

JB: Very early in my career, 1964 or 65, Dick Higgins, the poet, who had a
beautiful brownstone, organized a series of evenings along with John Cage
for young artists. Cage would cook dinner and we would talk. Obviously he
got a lot out of it and so did everybody there. It was there that I first
heard of Norbert Weiner, first heard of McLuhan. Unlike the literati, the
people in the art world were extremely erudite and interested in the
sciences. People such as Rauschenberg and Cage were reading and talking
about McLuhan and I started to read his books . At these dinners that went
on for about a year, Cage would cook up his mushroom dishes and...

HUO: How many people did attend these meetings? How was your relationship
with Cage?

"I was thinking about this, that there was a consciousness that hadn't
revealed itself yet but it was immanent in the work a lot of people were
doing, and it all came together in the arts: cybernetics, communications
theory. I realized I was dead center in the middle of it..."

JB: Six, maybe ten. People like Ed Schlossberg, Philip Glass... the people
who were there were cooking and all interesting characters. I never
developed any kind of one-on-one relationship with Cage. He was not that
kind of cuddly guy; he was very Zen. I once inquired of Higgins why he
hadn't responded to something I brought up during a session. "It's because
he doesn't think you need him", Higgins replied.
I was 23 or 24 and at that time I came up with an interesting idea which
has guided many of my actions over the years: the idea that I could look
upon my contemporaries as historical figures. I was thinking about some of
the people of my own age and generation, radicals such as Huey P. Newton
and Abbie Hoffmann, artists such as Byars, Paik and Warhol.
Idea number two is that the world is a finite proposition. It's not
sitting a priori like some modernist masterwork for a literary art critic
to decipher, it is, quite simply, "said". Take it off the tongue. If ours
is a world of words, who has said it? A finite number of people throughout
human history have uttered the words that vocabulary that we call "the
universe", "ourselves", "reality". There aren't that many; you can identify
them. In terms of the sciences, and much of this is bootlegged from
scientific ideas over a period of time, there are more scientists today
than have ever lived throughout history. Well who are they? Who is
inventing the world? Who is doing the empirical work that will take us to
the epistemological crossroads where everything has to be rethought?
That's what I started to track back in 1965.

HUO: Ballad coined the term of a junction maker.

JB: I was thinking about this, that there was a consciousness that hadn't
revealed itself yet but it was immanent in the work a lot of people were
doing, and it all came together in the arts: cybernetics, communications
theory. I realized I was dead center in the middle of it, and because of
what I did and what I was interested in I could communicate with all these
various people and become a nexus.

HUO: That's also the time when you went to see McLuhan?

JB: This was before. My entire career since then has been in pursuit of
this vision. In a funny way, the literary agent business is just a
spin-off rather than the other way around as people would imagine.

HUO: One can say all these different parts are unfolding from this set of
questions.

"I had no science background, and I had never been interested in science
per se. I'm interested in ideas. I think I've sat through one or two
scientific lectures in my life, and it's probably too many."

JB: It wasn't a calling, it's just what interests me. There is a book that
McLuhan turned me onto, "Doubt and Certainty in Science", by J.Z. Young
(Oxford University, 1951). Young I gather is in his nineties,he's still
alive, and he has this phrase that's repeated in dozens of books: "Man
creates tools and is molded by his use of them". "The heart is a pump" is
the product of Newton. "The brain is a computer" came along in the fifties
and people got very upset. Now it's old hat, we've gone beyond that.
We've become a clockwork, we've become an information system. New York is
Newtonian, L.A. is Einsteinian, and in a very real way we are a reflection
of the tools we create. That's important to me because the words of the
world become the life of the world, and nature is not a creation, nature is
said. The question is "who is saying it?". I look to the people of the
third culture people, and by third culture I mean those who through their
empirical work are changing the nature of ourselves and reality, whether
they are scientists are not. It's a big enough umbrella to include what I
call the Digerati, which is people who are using technology and new
communications ideologies to radically reboot the whole idea of human
communication.

HUO: Let's go back to the beginnings of your work in the 60s. Not coming
particularly form a science background, how did you start to meet all these
different scientists?

JB: I had no science background, and I had never been interested in science
per se. I'm interested in ideas. I think I've sat through one or two
scientific lectures in my life, and it's probably too many. But I read
voraciously. When Cage recommended a book, I would read it. Then I would
read that book's bibliography. So I would not only read McLuhan but I
would read everything he read. It would take me down some interesting
pathways and into some very deep ideas. I was fortunate since I did not
have the baggage, getting back to the European thing of having to ask
permission, and also since I was doing very interesting stuff myself, I had
no problem in picking the phone up and calling anybody and saying, "I'm
organizing the Expanded Cinema Festival and I've read your book. Can we
talk?"

HUO: So that's how these contacts started.

JB: Yes. And people called me. One was cultural anthropologist Edward T.
Hall, one of my intellectual heroes, who called me one day out of the blue,
introduced himself (I said, "I know who you are"), and said, "I have a plan
to end the war in Vietnam. I'm working with the State Department, and
you're central to it. When can we talk?" I said "Well, when would you
like?" He said, "I'm in Chicago, I can be in New York in four hours". Four
hours later I was sitting with Edward T. Hall talking about his multi-media
blitz on Lyndon Johnson which he wanted me to orchestrate, to make him
realize what was really going on.

HUO: Can you talk a bit about the Expanded Cinema Festival?

John Brockman (Hartvig 1992)

JB: I got out of the army in 1963, came to New York and promptly had my own
investment leasing company with an office on Park Avenue. Going to the
office everyday and looking at paper and talking to businessmen, but at
night I went down to St. Mark's Church where one of my boyhood friends was
working at Theater Genesis, which was an off-off-off Broadway theater. I
must have had a strong yearning to do something more creative, because I
began hanging out every night and helping out . Myself and a couple of
other young guys - Sam Shepherd who had just arrived in New York, and his
friend Charles Mingus, Jr. would set up the chairs, sweep the floor, etc.
After a while, I forget how this happened, Michael Allen, the minister,
asked me to start a film program. I started an avant-garde film program
which was an immediate success. The place was packed with hundreds being
turned away. At that point Willard van Dyk ran a program at Moma which was
very up-scale avant-garde cinema, and Jonas Mekas ran the underground
cinema stuff at Film-maker's Cinematheque. After a few months of this I
recall sitting playing my banjo in Central Park (I used to be a folk
singer) and there's Jonas Mekas walking by with his ubiquitous little 8 mm
camera starts and he began filming me.

HUO: His Bolex, which he still uses.

JB: We talk, and in an hour I was the Manager of the Filmmaker's
Cinematheque. I would leave my office on Park Ave. wearing my Brooks
Brothers suit and velvet black collar and go down at 5 o'clock and run the
Cinematheque.

HUO: It was like a double life.

"I came up with the idea of a multimedia
entertainment space. I brought USCO into the project and within six month
we had opened the world's first mixed-media disco, "Murry the K's World"
which was announced to the world on the cover of Life Magazine."

JB: In a way I've always been a control group. Let everyone else be
downtown and hip, and I'll be uptown and straight, or vice-versa. So it
wasn't a problem for me. It wasn't a problem for them either. The place
was completely unruly and unmanageable, and at least I could run something,
which I did. It went very well. Mekas went off to the Baltics to visit
family. He had come up with some general plan to do institute a program
involving cinema and other arts, and he just laid it in my lap. He had a
list of people, and I added some, and he left the country. Life is the
theater of one chance, from the Zen Buddhist teaching where if at one point
in life you take an action, everything changes completely. What I did was
send a personal letter out to the press. It wasn't a press release, just a
statement of what I was hoping to accomplish. The result was massive global
coverage on which led to two related Life covers in a year, a New York
Times Magazine cover, just tremendous effect. The Festival was also a
fabulous event, so that added to it. Each artist, dancer, poet received a
mandate to do something that included cinema in their work, and that was
it. They each got fifty dollars.

HUO: All time-based art?

JB: Mostly performances or events.

HUO: Who were the artists you worked with?

JB: La Monte Young, Rauschenberg, Oldenburg, Whitman, USCO, Carolee
Schneeman, Jerry Joffen, Nam June Paik, Jack Smith, etc. Until then the
Cinematheque had been the home for the 8 mm artists making movies, people
like Stan Brackhage, Gregory Markopoulos, Stan Vanderbeek, Ed Emshwiller...

HUO: Kind of a ghetto.

JB: Well, I wouldn't say that. It was what it was. This took it from that
to a much broader art world focus. Until then, no one in the art world was
paying attention. I remember ... the Cinematheque had moved, Mekas was in
Europe. The night of the Rauschenberg piece, he returned and found throngs
of people outside the theater. Inside, in the lobby, Mike Wallace was
interviewing Teddy Kennedy for CBS-TV. Jonas walked up to me and handed me
a letter informing me that my services were no longer required. From his
point of view I had things too well organized and this was affecting the
artistic license of the Cinematheque regulars. I could accept that. On the
other hand people like art historian Meyer Shapiro began to attend events.
One night Miro showed up and stayed for a 3-hour piece by Nam June Paik.
For this kind of crowd the shows had to begin on schedule. So there was
tension.

HUO: This was before you had done anything in publishing?

JB: Publishing started much later. After the Cinematheque, I did a
project for Michael Meyerberg, the Broadway producer who did the famous
Broadway production of Waiting for Godot, eminent, high class productions.
He had an airplane hangar in Roosevelt Field, Long Island that was used as
a movie studio. He asked me, "Can you do something with it?" This was the
start of my next career as the first McLuhanesque consultant. I said, "no
problem, I can handle it".

HUO: Could we say this was the daily practice of McLuhan?

JB: McLuhan collaborated with USCO, a group of anonymous artists who
pioneered the whole genre of multi-media. USCO would do a performance and
Mcluhan would then talk about it. I came up with the idea of a multimedia
entertainment space. I brought USCO into the project and within six month
we had opened the world's first mixed-media disco, "Murry the K's World"
which was announced to the world on the cover of Life Magazine. Within a
week every bar in New York had a slide projector. Even today, go to a
movie and you see moiré patterns on the screen between shows, or check out
the flashing strobe lights in a disco - some of the stuff is still around.

HUO: What exactly was your function in this project?

JB: A cross between impressario, producer, and artist; conceiving a
project and putting together a team to do it. Interestingly, I originally
brought in Andy Warhol, and the project was called "Andy Warhold's World".
For some reason I can't recall, Andy dropped out and we wound up with
Murray the K, a disc jockey also known as "the fifth Beatle." Later I was
invoved with Andy at the environment at the Dom on St Mark's Place.

HUO: What was the next move?

"In business, if you stop, you're dead, it's over. You can't stop.
Every year my company inevitably gets bigger."

JB: Amos Vogel of the New York Film Festival showed up and asked me to do
something similar - a special projects program -for the 1965 Film Festival.
A few months later - it was Labor Day, 1965 - I'm profiled on the front
page of the Sunday New York Times Arts section, "What Happens after
Happenings?", regarding what I was doing at Lincoln Center. The next day I
got in the elevator and William Schuman, the composer and President of
Lincoln Center, glared at me and said, "I've been reading about you." They
weren't too happy. But I put on a series of similar-type events. It was
lot of fun. I got into a broader frame, meeting a different crowd -
film-makers such as Goddard, Fellini, Forman, Wells, among others. I gave
Scorcese a screening. He was a student at NYU doing a different kind of
thing but an enormously talented guy.

HUO: This was Scorcese's first public project?

JB: Outside of NYU, he was still a student.

HUO: When did the publishing start? Was it a similar idea, to produce people?

JB: This was in 1973. It followed a very successful consulting career which
began after Lincoln Center. I worked with General Electric, Scott Paper,
Metro Media, Colombia Pictures, the Pentagon, the White House.

HUO: Consulting on media projects?

JB: Communications, ideas, but really reframing what people did, what their
business was. I was also on Wall Street doing stuff for investment banks
and companies they worked with. Then I settled into writing. In 1973 I
was at the AUM conference - all the participants were authors, some of them
best-selling authors: Alan Watts, Ram Das Stewart Brand... no one there
had an agent. A few of them said to me, "Why don't you represent our
interests in New York?" I had gotten an MBA at Colombia Business School,
so I had some background, I could do things. I said OK. I went for it and
within a few weeks I sold John Lilly's new book for a lot of money. I
figured I could just write and do this for three or four hours a day.
Well, the joke was on me. Because of the immediate success I learned
something about business they don't teach in business school. In business,
if you're growing, you have to accelerate growth to maintain the cash flow
to accommodate the growth. Otherwise, you have to take in investors. To do
the business you incur expenses, you have to pay taxes, you have increase
revenues. It becomes a self-organized system.

HUO: There is a great text by Paul Krugman about the self-organization of
economy. He come to very similar conclusions as in Science in terms of
self-organized systems.

JB: In business, if you stop, you're dead, it's over. You can't stop.
Every year my company inevitably gets bigger. But for many years I wrote
books and that's how I was able to bootstrap the operation.

HUO: So this activity took over, time-wise.

JB: Very quickly. And it's been like that for twenty-five years.

HUO: One ongoing theme seems to be the salon, from the early John Cage
salon to your first own salons up to the Digerati Dinners and the Edge
events. Has
there been an evolution?

"I like people for whom the world is the
only subject, for whom anything less than everything means nothing. That's
what I expect from the people I hang out with and that´s why I spend a lot
of time alone."

JB: First of all, I hate the word "salon" because it connotes a rich person
condescendingly entertaining creative people, and that's never been the
case. To me it's just dinner. I like people for whom the world is the
only subject, for whom anything less than everything means nothing. That's
what I expect from the people I hang out with and that´s why I spend a lot
of time alone. There are not that many of them. If I can gather a few of
these people together from time to time, fine. What these evenings
represent is what's interesting to me.
By the eighties I was pretty much out of the art world - I knew it was time
to walk after a conversation with an artist regarding his favorite
collector's landscape gardener. In 1983 I went to Comdex in Las Vegas, and
found it to be wildly exciting. I had been wondering "where are things
happening?", well, this is what's happening. A different cast of
characters, a bunch of nerdy-type people wearing nondescript clothing, but
- what passion, what excitement. This thing called the personal computer
was coming in and changing everything. Just like today the Internet is the
agent of change. What interests me are the edges of the culture.

HUO: What exactly is the function of your famous dinners?

JB: The pattern that seems to have evolved is to organize a social life
around these dinners, where I can go to a town, send out a few emails, and
see everyone I know in one night, thirty, forty, seventy people. This
brought a certain fame in 1983 when the Wall Street Journal ran a front
page story mentioning my "millionaires dinners." Even this year, several
magazine articles have been devoted to recent dinners in Monterey and San
Francisco.

HUO: You're refering to the Digerati dinners in the eighties and nineties
that take place in different cities.

"I had a dinner in London last year for seventy people: the press, the
publishers, best-selling writers, everyone comes. I've done them in Paris,
in Cannes, Prague, Amsterdam, etc. .. it's a fun thing to do."

JB: There are different ones, like the one I had at TED. Last year I
couldn't even get in the conference. I went to Monterey and had a dinner.
I had one in California three weeks ago. I also had a dinner with
scientists two weeks ago out here. It's different groups, but they can
overlap to some degree.

HUO: So these dinners are not just in NYC, they travel with you.

JB: I had a dinner in London last year for seventy people: the press, the
publishers, best-selling writers, everyone comes. I've done them in Paris,
in Cannes, Prague, Amsterdam, etc. .. it's a fun thing to do.

HUO: How are the dinners related to Edge? Could you define Edge?

JB: Edge is the electronic iteration of the Reality Club which started in
1980, which in a sense formalized what I did at these dinners. It
celebrates thinking smart versus the anesthesiology of wisdom. It's the
idea of somebody getting up and presenting questions they are asking
themselves, usually in a New York venue in a New York style, with an
expectation they are going to be challenged. But they are not doing it in
front of their peers in their academic discipline or their field, they are
doing it in front of people who are their equals in other areas. It can be
really exciting, and it can be awfully boring.

HUO: So it doesn't work every time. There is the risk of failure.

JB: That's part of it's charm.

HUO: I started a very informal kind of meeting between artists, scientists,
etc., but always with only five or six people. It either works or it
fails. I observed in your Digerati evening, when I came earlier this year,
that with seventy people you have many dinners within the dinner. Every
table is a dinner within the dinner, even if people mingle. The
complexity is higher.

JB: The Reality Club wasn't a dinner. I would serve food but it was a talk
and then discussion.

HUO: To have the chronology for the sake of the interview, when did the
Reality Club become Edge?

JB: The Reality Club started in 1980. The name was a pun, but some people
took it seriously. I was spending a lot of time at my house in the
Hamptons, and all people would talk about was realty. So I decided to have
my own club and make it the Reality Club. It was just something I was
doing anyway. That went on for a good ten years. The other person most
active in it, who towards the end became the President was Heinz Pagels;
he died in a tragic mountain climbing accident. It was painful; he was
such a good friend. That took the heart out of it. It went on to 1991 or
92. Just around that time the Web started, around 1993.
Another thing was that in 1980 when I started it, I put together a group
that included some people that had done very interesting work that I came
across during the sixties, which meant did it in the fifties. By 1980 some
of the people hadn't done anything in twenty-five years, and by 1990 it was
thirty-five years. If you have a group that meets regularly, two or three
times a month, the people who are really cooking are not going to be able
to make it a lot because they're really busy, and the people who can make
it all the time probably aren't doing much. It got to a point where it was
time to change the subject.

HUO: So it lost the edge.

JB: I let it go for a couple years and started Edge with a different cast
of characters.

HUO: Is there also a fixed core of people, regulars?

JB: There is the Third Culture mail list, you're on it, and if you, or
others on the list tell me to add someone on the list, I'll do it. It's
not exclusive I terms of excluding people; it's inclusive as regards the
social network.

HUO: More fluid than the Reality Club.

JB: Yes. In order to come to a meeting of the Reality Club you had to have
given a talk. No spouses or significant others were allowed. It's much
more open ended. However the mail list is private, and that's where all
the action occurs. You get the e-mails, right?

HUO: I get the Edge interviews.

JB: That's it.

HUO: Do you do all the interviews yourself?

JB: Yes. It's almost three-quarters of a million words so far.

HUO: We were talking about boundaries.

"I have little interest in a journalistic interpretations of
the work or ideas of people capable of deep thinking. I have less interest
in reading about their personal lived. Just show me their notes."

JB: E-mail is the killer application. The Edge editions are very long by
email standards. There is a nostrum (an excepted wisdom) vis-ā-vis the
internet that you only send one page. People say, "These are so long!",
and I respond, "I know, and my Picasso drawing is too big for my couch".
So don't read it! I don't want to hear about it. If I've got Steven
Pinker talking and saying something interesting, I'm not going to turn off
the tape recorder.

HUO: It can go on for dozens of pages which is very important because it
can happen on the Net; in dailies and weeklies it doesn't happen anymore.

JB: The public has access to the Edge Web site and can read the pieces but
there's no response mechanism. There are no "Letters to the Editor". It's a
public service, read only. I don't feel I have to be there personally for
everybody. It's not a publication in that sense.

HUO: Tell me about the World Question Center.

JB: That was James Lee Byars. In 1970-71, he created the World Question
Center in which he was calling his list of the 100 most brilliant minds to
ask them questions they were asking themselves. Byars being Byars, seventy
of them hung up on him.

HUO: I attended one of his last performances, in the garden of the
Foundation Cartier. He came to Paris to give a last performance a few
months before he went to Egypt to die. He walked for a couple of seconds
in his golden suit and went back to the hotel.

JB: In person, he was irascible and demanding. One day I got a call from a
live tv show on Belgian national television. It's Byars in Brussels in a
conference call with the Dalai Lama, Herman Khan and myself, asking each
of us for our question. The Dalai Lama asked his question and Byars hung up
on him. So, that's what Byars was like. After his death last year, I did
WTQ on Edge to honor him. Year after year, I recall Byars' mantra: "Call
Freeman Dyson, Johnny, the world's smartest man, get his question, Johnny;
let's go see him, let's call him". As you can see, Freeman has now asked
his question.

HUO: So it was the realization of a hitherto unrealised project. Will you
continue this question project? What's the next step?

JB: I'll think about it; I've thought about it.

HUO: My last question concerns the immanency/imminencey of doing an
interview with you who does so many interviews. Your books Digerati,
Third Culture, Edge are all based on interviews. You seem to have a
predilection for the medium of the interview. As Marcel Broodthaers said:
"Je tautologue, je conserve, je sociologue".

JB: For Edge I do interviews, but in my book, The Third Culture, I edited
myself out.

HUO: In Digerati you took yourself out as well.

JB: My role becomes more of director than writer, although I certainly
rewrote a lot of the pieces. Narrative non-fiction, to me, is an utter
waste of time. I have little interest in a journalistic interpretations of
the work or ideas of people capable of deep thinking. I have less interest
in reading about their personal lived. Just show me their notes.

HUO: The idea that's it's not the secondary but the primary voice.

JB: Primary stuff. One hundred years from now a dialogue with Daniel
Dennett or Richard Dawkins will be valuable for someone to read; not so an
impressionistic, gonzo journalistic article or book.

HUO: It's the same thing for artists. I've started to publish lots of
artists' writings because I think the writings of artists usually give much
better access to their work than most of the literature about the artist.

JB: And also, do you really think anyone is interested in my ideas on
evolutionary biology? on or quantum mechanics? Should they be? The best I
can do is make available, in a readable way, the real thing. Much of what
passes for writing today is baby talk.

HUO: How do you see your role as an agent?

"What I'm doing is providing entertainment for the
smartest people. If you're really bright, where do you go for
entertainment?"

JB: I take very seriously my role as an agent, which is fiduciary; it's
about money and business, and I do my best. When I'm sitting with an
author it's like a mouse looking at cheese; it's about money, and that's
what they see when they look at me. On the other hand, I do happen to work
with a lot of the most sublime thinkers that have ever lived. By doing the
Edge project, I can put a different hat on and talk to them as an editor,
and I can talk to them the way you're talking to me, and, I get to learn
something.
I run the best graduate school in the world and I am the only student.

HUO: That's beautiful.

JB: I edit everything personally; I don't have any help. Everything goes
through my word processor. The idea that education stops when you get out
of school is absurd. What I'm doing is providing entertainment for the
smartest people. If you're really bright, where do you go for
entertainment? The movies? Think about conglomerization of the
entertainment industry in America. Everything is geared to prototypical
mass-market. But you can still get very diverse and interesting stuff in
books, and on the Internet, I.e. this kind of e-mail distribution.
In terms of how I choose things, I have a gut instinct. I just go with
whatever interests me. In terms of business I can make a living doing
that. There's no magic formula. That could be an information book,
something very banal, or it could be a very serious thinker. If I'm
interested, then I know there's a market. It just worked out that way.
Let me just make one distinction: The Edge is a non-profit foundation, and
since the Reality club began in 1980, there has never been more than 30% of
the people as clients. Most people are not clients, like yourself. Also,
about 80% of my clients have nothing to do with Edge. It's not about
business; it's a way to get away from business. Bateson came over one day
in the early seventies and cautioned me by saying, "of all our human
inventions, economic man is by far the dullest". And recently I read
something by Drucker of the need more than ever to create social spaces
that are not about money. That's my goal.

HUO: We were talking about the issue of a mainly American context in the
sciences...

JB: By and large, Europeans get a much broader, deeper education up until
college age, then after that it becomes very hierarchical in nature and
rigid. It's not conducive to the kind of back and forth creativity which
sometimes occurs between fellow professors, graduate students,and/or
assistant professors. Europeans can get stuck in narrow slots; it's
petrified.

HUO: So that there is no cross-fertilizing of ideas.

JB: No, that's because culture gets in the way. Call it Culture with a
capital C. It's the one thing Europe can dispense with.

HUO: Are there any thinkers from Europe you're interested in?

JB: I am sure interesting people are around. I image the people who would
interest me are probably off the commercial radar screen and that's where
head is at these days.

HUO: Could you talk more about the social spaces Drucker is mentioning.

JB: When I left the Army and came to New York in 1963, I went downtown
every night to the Cedar Bar. I couldn't conceive of not going there. The
people were larger than life, their ideas were larger than life. It was a
thrill to be there. Similarly a few years later, Max's Kansas City became
the place and I was there every night without fail. The whole world passed
through and that's where you found out the gossip and you did serious work
in terms of networks and relationships. Nothing like that exists today.

HUO: I spoke with Steina Vasulka , the Icelandic video pioneer, who once
did a show at Max's Kansas City. She thought is was much more important to
do it at Max's Kansas City than to do a show at MOMA or a big museum; it
really was the thing. I don't think that this kind of social space exists
anymore in NYC. Maybe E-mail replaced it.~